I’m going through a pseudonym reassignment process. I’ve dropped the ‘P’ from the front of my name – it was an obscure reference to Terry Pratchett (while another such reference exists on the ‘About’ page for this blog), and people keep reading my name as ‘phobias’ instead.

Andrew Bolt posts a story of a wrongful conviction as an argument against the death penalty. The comments from the Boltheads are where things get truly frightening. Apparently, not only does capital punishment have a strong deterrent effect (at least in the United States), but wrongful convictions are no longer possible because of DNA evidence – and even if they were, executing a few innocent people is a price worth paying to ensure that dangerous criminals are kept off the streets and put into the cemetery where they belong.

I tend to find Andrew Bolt’s views repugnant in many cases, and flawed in most, but in this case we seem to be in agreement. The really disturbing thing is that many of his followers are a lot more distorted in their view of reality than he is.

I have added some bits and pieces to the sidebar on the blog’s main page. These include some AddThis buttons for feed subscription and social bookmarking, as well as some external RSS feeds. I am drawing election news from Aunty’s web site, and I am also showing the conversations on other blogs I am tracking through co.mments. I started using this system to track comment threads recently, and so far it’s working pretty well.

If any of the stuff is not working as planned or if there are more useful things I could add, I’d welcome any feedback.